Few inventions have had such an impact on modern society as television. Unfortunately, this influence is not always positive, and often very negative, given that television is becoming a tool of propaganda and zombification of the population in the hands of totalitarian regimes.
The emergence of television
The first television in history began broadcasting in San Francisco on September 7, 1927. The earliest television system was developed by Philo Taylor Farnsworth, a brilliant 21-year-old inventor. Farnsworth essentially created a system that could capture moving images in a form that could be encoded into radio waves and then converted back into images on a screen. Interestingly, the first image Farnsworth transmitted was a simple line that turned into a dollar sign. And it turned into a dollar sign because one of the investors asked the inventor: “When are we going to see dollars in this thing, Farnsworth?”
Soon, investors fully realized that there was a lot of money to be made in television.
RCA, a company engaged in the radio business in the United States with two NBC networks, invested $50 million in television development. The best scientists of the time were hired to develop this project. And so in 1939, RCA broadcast the opening of the World’s Fair in New York, including a speech by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was the first president to appear on television. Later that year, RCA paid for a license to use Farnsworth’s television patents.
In those days, TVs were not so popular, and having a TV in the house was a luxury, a curiosity. But over time, they became cheaper and more accessible to the masses. RCA, seeking to increase its audience, began selling TVs with 5 by 12 inch (12.7 by 25.4 cm) kinescopes.
The company also began to broadcast regular programs, for example, on May 17, 1939, a baseball game between Princeton and Columbia universities was first shown on television. By 1941, the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), RCA’s main competitor in radio, also launched its television service, broadcasting two 15-minute newscasts a day to a tiny audience on its New York television station.
Needless to say, early television was black and white and generally quite primitive. For example, all the action at the first baseball game shown on television had to be captured by a single camera, and the limitations of the first cameras forced actors to work in incredibly bright light, with black lipstick and green makeup (cameras did not perceive white well).
The first newscasts on CBS were simply conversations, with the anchor moving a pointer over a map of Europe engulfed in World War II. The poor image quality made it hard to see the anchor, let alone the map.
The Second World War slowed the development of television as companies like RCA shifted their focus to military production. The development of television was further slowed by the struggle for wavelength allocation with the new FM radio and the struggle for government regulation. A 1941 decision by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) should sell one of its two radio networks was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1943. The second network was the new American Broadcasting Company (ABC), which entered television early in the next decade. Six experimental television stations remained on the air during the war – one each in Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Schenectady, New York, and two in New York City. But full-scale commercial television broadcasting began in the United States only in 1947.
Rapid growth
After the Second World War, television companies began to appear like mushrooms after the rain in Europe and Asia. Television was developing rapidly, and new programs began to appear: newscasts, comedy and variety shows, and educational television programs. In general, much was borrowed from television’s “big brother,” radio.
Also, after the Second World War, many people realized how effective advertising on television could be, and soon the television advertising market began to grow at a cosmic pace, and advertising revenue created a huge flow of dollars for the world’s leading television companies (here we can recall with a smile the doubts of a skeptical investor who asked Fansworth his question about when he would see dollars there).
By 1951, the number of televisions in use had grown from 6,000 in 1946 to about 12 million. No new invention penetrated American homes faster than black-and-white televisions. By 1955, televisions were in half of all U.S. homes.